ETHS 319 AGQ - (Post)colonial Cinema and Asia

Minimum Credit(s) Awarded: 4
Maximum Credit(s) Awarded: 4

Geisha, Madame Butterfly, China dolls, Arabian bazaars, exotic sampans, mysterious mountain peaks—-these are just some of the recurring images of Asia, or “the Orient,” in the European and American popular imagination. The place of Europe’s oldest, richest colonies and the U.S. military adventures and territorial expansions, Asia has become not only an integral part of the imperial West’s material culture and civilization but also its exotic, mysterious, feminine, and ultimately inferior Other. A persistent critic of the Western supremacist ideologies has been Edward Said, who refers to the West’s imperialist and masculinist constructions of the East as Orientalism, a set of terms, ideas, and principles that contain and control the Otherness of the Orient.

In what ways has the colonial West’s conceptualization of the East persisted or changed in contemporary cinema since Said’s epochal critique over four decades ago? How has Said’s notion of Orientalism been extended and modified in postcolonial and postcolonial feminist film studies? How is the Orientalist discourse reproduced, complicated, and challenged in Western and Eastern film? In what ways do race, gender, and nation intersect in Orientalist cinematic narratives? In what specific historical and geopolitical contexts do cinematic texts portray (anti-) Orientalist images and visions of Asia? In what ways are such inquiries relevant or urgent as we negotiate the complex relations between women and men as well as the East and the West in today’s cultural and geopolitical contexts?

In this course, we will explore these key critical questions and understand film as an important cultural, as well as art, form for the production, dissemination, and critique of Western European and American knowledge about genders, sexualities, and nations. Cross-listed THA 319

Offered Other

Prerequisite(s): W tag